“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

.

.

10 August 2017

WOMEN IN WINE AWARDS

Which must presume that women are somehow different to all other winemakers, or surely the organisation wouldn't exist.

In a time when we're all struggling to learn to see each other as equals worth marrying, I can't possibly work out how a human with a vagina, or whatever it is that now delineates your actual woman, makes wine any differently to a person with a penis. Or, foolishly assuming acceptance of these traditionally-regarded extremes, any point between.

Or out further. I don't care.

Maybe to properly equal everything out, we should have an Arseholes in Wine Award. Whether already rigged with dick, cunt, both, or neither, nearly everybody has an arsehole. And every poor bugger I've met without one sure knows plenty of them.

Bacchus knows, the wine business overflows with testosterone-soused idiots. I'm tired of 'em, regardless of their chromosomes. Many are people who I imagine have vaginas. I don't really care. Too many are male jerks or whatever the permissable word for what was that gender now is.

Jerks will do for now.

Confession: I tire of male-ridden wine functions. I'm a hardcore philogynist, in or out of wine.

But just as too many Ocker wine blokes jerk themselves to unserviceable, so I encounter lasses who flick the bean so fucking hard they can no longer hear or read anything unless it's about themselves.

Anyway, before they make the big winners announcement, I want to recommend Annika Berlingieri for practical winemaking and exceptional gastronomic intelligence, above, and Brande Nicole Roderick, below, for target marketing. Or her agent. And the photographer.

8 comments:

Indeed. The patronising men-only Beefsteak and Burgundy clubs reluctantly tolerated "the womenfolk" forming their own C&C clubs to avoid drawing attention to their exclusive old boy shows with their sexist carry-on. How droll. I much preferred being guest speaker at the Chicken and Chablis shows. I wonder if any still exist?

In those bleak days one very famous NSW winemaker with a penis (I presumed a very small one) made the terrible mistake of taking me to lunch at at Cobbs, an infamous topless restaurant in Adelaide, to present his wines to me. He seemed peeved that so many of the waiters called me 'Whitey' - we all drank in The Exeter. They were alarmed to see me visiting the place they worked to pay for their university studies, but remained utterly professional whilst pouring our tasting samples.

You're the best text editor in the business, Sally. You were the only person I'd trust with my copy for A Year In The Life Of Grange. And look at what happened! We won all the book Oscars from New York to Beijing! [None in Australia, of course. I wonder whether Australian winos can actually read].

White that reminds of a guitar solo you played upstairs in Miss Gadys Sym Chooms cracker factory with Brakesband on the only Les Paul Recorder i've ever seen in 1973 I was standing crammed down the side wall with Young Modern and The Angels and BLF Darby was lying on the floor asleep with his headon the sandbags in the kickdruma huge smile of his dial there were 159 of us in a room built for ten thanks man still alive! String B

Merci Merci Philip! Never a truer word written, as a winemaking female I am embarrassed and insulted by the Women in Wine Awards.Why am I not seen as a winemaker, what has my gender anything to do with it, these awards are making us appear to be less able than the men, that we need special treatment. STOP them now they are nothing but an insult to those of us who feel equal or better than our male colleagues. Grow up for Gods sake, stop behaving in such an inferior manner. Power to those who take it!!

CONFESSIONS

"After enough years newspapermen begin to pall on other newspapermen; they begin to take their good qualities for granted and wince at their shortcomings, of which the most common are a vanity that sometimes borders on the thespian and a sort of perpetual mental adolescence that I think stems from starting a fresh story every day or every week or month and never having time to get to the bottom of anything. They forget that newspapermen as a class have a yearning for truth as involuntary as a hophead’s addiction to junk. The question of whether the junkie really loves hop is academic; he can’t get along without it. A newspaperman may write a lie to hold his job, but he won’t believe it, and the necessity outrages him so that he craves truth all the more thereafter. A few newspapermen lie to get on in the world, but it outrages them, too, and I have never known a dishonest journalist who wasn’t patently an unhappy bastard."

A.J. Liebling,

war correspondent,

New Yorker,

Algiers,

January 1942.

HEALTH WARNING

"Take the hair", it is well written,"of the dog by which you're bitten.Work off one wine by his brother,chase one poison with another".Antiphanes, 479BC

HEALTH WARNING

"Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love."Sheba to Solomon, Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, ch2v5

Coda

(for Laurence Smulders

4 April 1932 - 28 June 1997)

Some go without any money,

Some go without any clothes;

Some go like ants stuck in honey,

Some go where nobody goes.

Philip White

GOOD ISLAMIC ADVICE

“Ale, especially that made from barley, clogs the sinews, causes headache and congestion of the head, yet it overstimulates the action of the kidneys, and, when drunk to excess, lowers the temperature.That, however, which is brewed from wheat, and is flavoured with mint and parsley, is judged better for everybody.Still, in the case of persons exposed to the sun’s heat, in feverish conditions and sultry weather, its use is inadvisable.”

From The Science Of Dining – A Medieval Treatise on the Hygiene of the Table and the Laws of Health, translated from the Latin by Arthur S. Way D. Lit, MacMillan, 1936.Previous translation The Schoolmaster, 1583. Original text from Mohammed ibn Zakariya al Razi, Arabic medical writer (865-925AD).

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by John Peake - about 1955, Broken Hill, Australia. House paint on Masonite, 163 x 110cm